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At the end of the Second World War, American Joe Esquibel lost a silver bracelet when serving as a guard at a prisoner-of-war camp near the west Bohemian town of Mariánské Lázně. Now, more than 76 years later, he got it back thanks to a chance discovery by a local man.

With the Omicron wave due to hit the Czech Republic with full force within 10 days, the new administration is scrambling to take measures that would prevent an overload of hospitals and major fallouts in key sectors of the economy. While vaccination has become something of a mantra for both the old and new administrations, the new government is now on thin ice over a directive on mandatory vaccination for selected high-risk groups.

The majority of Czechs are optimistic about the upcoming year. Meanwhile, a third expect it will be worse that 2021, according to a newly released Median survey commissioned by Czech Radio. Respondents said rising inflation and the devaluation of their savings are their biggest concern going into 2022.

The Czech government is considering shortening isolation periods for people who test positive for Covid-19. Prime Minister Petr Fiala also says that the state will cover the cost of compulsory workplace tests due to start in two weeks’ time.

For three decades now Glen Emery has been one of the best-known foreigners in Prague. The charismatic Canadian was a pioneering bar and club operator in the city back in the “Wild East” days of the early 1990s and is still running pubs today. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Emery has accumulated lots of fantastic stories over the years, tales which he has collected in an as yet unpublished memoir. We touched on some of them in a wide-ranging chat, though I began by asking my guest about an unusual teenage experience.

Chateau Lobkowitz was once the seat of one of the most powerful noble families in Bohemia. Decades of communist rule have left it in a dilapidated state. But now, a young couple from Germany has moved in and plans to restore the chateau back to its former glory.

The faces of two 9th century Great Moravian nobles have been newly reconstructed in extraordinary detail. The project is the work of anthropologist Eva Vaníčková and sculptor Ondřej Bílek, who have been using scientific methods to create hyper-realistic facial reconstructions of historical figures for six years now. Their work was recently published in a new bi-lingual Czech-English book, which includes over a dozen faces that the duo has brought back from the past.

Although Covid numbers in the Czech Republic have been steadily dropping for over a month now, experts warn that the country faces a massive wave of Omicron infections in the coming weeks. In an effort to phase-out the spread of the epidemic, the government has ordered massive testing in companies and institutions of both vaccinated and unvaccinated employees.

During the Cold War, Prague was at the focus of interest of many intelligence agents. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, there are now thousands of formerly top-secret documents publicly available in the CIA’s electronic reading room that provide a veritable trove of fascinating historical information on what the Americans knew about Czechoslovakia.

The most-shared Facebook posts in the Czech Republic this year stemming from news sites, as you might well imagine, concerned the coronavirus pandemic. According to an analysis of nearly 500,000 reports, the top post, shared 41,000 times, was a bogus report by Aeronet.cz, a known spreader of pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation.